Object Visibility

Staralt is a program that shows the observability of objects in various ways: either you can plot altitude against time for a particular night (Staralt), or plot the path of your objects across the sky for a particular night (Startrack), or plot how altitude changes over a year (Starobs), or get a table with the best observing date for each object (Starmult). For further information, click on the "help" button at the bottom of the page.

Object use formant of RA and dec i.e. hh mm ss.s (+/-)dd mm ss.s (note the spaces between each group of digits). Note that you can enter more than one object and you can display the Moon's position through the night.

Finder Charts

This service provides online access to digitised optical Schmidt plates from the STScI Digitised Sky Surveys DSS and DSS-II. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The data is produced by the University of Leicester ~ LEDAS

The Sun's Neighborhood

The purpose of RECONS is to understand the nature of the Sun's nearest stellar neighbors, both individually and as a population. Our primary goals are to discover ``missing'' members of the stellar sample within 10 parsecs (32.6 light years), and to characterize all stars and their environments within that distance limit. New members are found via astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic techniques, and through searches for stellar, brown dwarf, and planetary companions at small and large separations. Characterization includes photometry and spectroscopy at both optical and infrared wavelengths, as well as determinations of the luminosity function, mass function, and multiplicity fraction of the nearby stars. RECONS is currently extending survey work to 25 parsecs in an effort to understand the Sun's and Earth's places among a larger population of our neighbors.

Exoplanets

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia is a working tool providing all the latest detections and data announced by professional astronomers, useful to facilitate progress in exoplanetology. The encyclopedia, started in 1995, is updated daily by Jean Schneider from the Paris Observatory ~ Encyclopedia